Telecom Service Providers Realize SD-WAN’s Flexibility
Managed SD-WAN services and performance management
As SD-WANs gain popularity, the telecommunications industry warms up to them. At present, service providers understand that, while Multiprotocol Label Change (MPLS) will be around for quite some time, software-defined WAN technology addresses the eventual future of networking.
Increasingly, corporate clients are seeking to outsource SD-WAN management, which is creating business opportunities for telcos. What role would SD-WAN play in managing their networks, which vertices lead the way, and what kind of challenges would they face?
A total of 103 telco service providers worldwide were surveyed by Heavy Reading, co-sponsored by Accedian, to assess their managed SD-WAN services. According to the report, comprehensive network performance management spanning legacy deployments and SD-WAN is essential to ensuring efficient managed services.
Taking the lead
SD-WAN was also shown in the SD-WAN report to be suitable for various vertical markets, particularly production and marketing. SD-WAN can be used to link retailer stores, warehouses, and distribution centers, similar to how it could connect distributors across the globe for a minimal fee. When medical care adopts an SD-WAN, it will join these ranks.
To meet expectations, respondents said SD-WAN software and extra network functions (VNF) should be deployed to all infrastructures: International Consumer Devices (eCPE), clouds, and their public cloud. As a result, they realize the need for a vendor-agnostic orchestration tool that can facilitate the management of different technological solutions as well as serve as a self-service portal and a single operational and order management tool.
As companies place an increasing focus on cloud-based services and edge computing, access to secure services (SASE) may become a reality within a few years (especially as SD-WAN networks become more secure).
Research findings reveal a great deal about where the market comes from, as well as how service providers normally separate between different business sectors, offering different attributes to focus on specific client needs.
Identifying challenges and identifying opportunities
The number one challenge in delivering managed SD-WAN is monitoring network performance across a hybrid SD-WAN, MPLS, and IP VPN. Approximately 66% of respondents describe monitoring network performance as a challenge, and 71% of the biggest service providers have this same issue.
Poor network accessibility, slow performance, high bandwidth, jitter, and latency are all issues with hybrid networks for managed SD-WAN providers. For the SLAs to be met and end-users to be pleased, it is highly important to obtain visibility into network and application performance. Not every case is straightforward. Getting the true experience of the end-user requires solutions that monitor the physical underlay as well as the overlay network.
Several service providers achieve this by outsourcing active performance monitoring on the exchange layer, as well as performance analytics and correlation engine capabilities, to an expert third party. To be able to correlate incidents for client reporting and SLA, it is essential to be able to gain the highly significant visibility of physical network performance as well as SD-WAN.
Truth be told, “correlating incidents between the overlay and the underlay in SLA reporting for clients” was the second most challenging topic (61%) cited by the biggest service provider. Efficacious network and application performance management is the key to overcoming significant challenges, particularly those related to SLA confirmation and multilayered root cause analysis.
